Peter Esterhazy

Dezső Kosztolányi

Richard Aczel

It is 1900, give or take a few years. The Vajkays—call them Mother and Father—live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives. Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, attending the theater. And this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark. Then, Skylark is back. Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life's creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the irredeemably ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical book.

Skylark

Princes, counts, commanders, diplomats, bishops, and patrons of the arts, revered, respected, and occasionally feared by their contemporaries, the Esterházy family was among the greatest and most powerful aristocrats in Hungarian history. Celestial Harmonies is the intricate chronicle of this remarkable family, a story spanning seven centuries of epic conquest, tragedy, triumph, and near annihilation. Told by Péter Esterházy, a scion of this populous family, Celestial Harmonies unfolds in two parts, revealing two versions of the Esterházy story. Book One is a compilation of short passages about the Esterházy men, sons reflecting on their fathers, from the earliest days of the Hapsburg Empire to its demise in the early twentieth century and beyond. At one point, the father is seen fighting the Turks and writing psalms, at another he is described as herding geese and feathering his already well-feathered nest. In the nineteenth century, he is caught cavorting with his mistress while looking after matters of state; in the 1940s and 1950s, he is seen helping to organize a number of conspiracies, then reporting them (and himself) to the secret police. Conversely, he is also seen apprehended and tortured by the authorities. The father is a monster and he is an angel, but, above all, he is a man in search of his God. Book Two chronicles the final chapter in the life of the Esterházy family, from the short Communist take over of 1919 to World War Two and its aftermath, when Hungary fell to Soviet rule and the Esterházys succumbed to dispossession, resettlement, and impoverishment. Here, Péter Esterházy reveals the story of his immediate family, especially his father, Mátyás Esterházy, who was born into great wealth and privilege in 1919. He worked as a field hand and parquet floor layer under the hard-line Communists, then, later on, as a translator making a meager living. It is a biography of a man who, despite the brutal tides of history, never relinquished the humanist values that were his birthright, and that were as inseparable from him as his illustrious name and heritage. On the first page of Celestial Harmonies, the father is seen as a baroque grand seigneur; on the last, he is seated by his typewriter, bereft of everything except for the one word, "homeland." The individual stories of these "fathers" -- separated by centuries -- are as complex as the history of Hungary itself. Dazzling in scope and profound in implication, Celestial Harmonies is fiction at its richest and most awe-inspiring.

A Novel

Celestial Harmonies

In The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube), Peter Esterhazy blends magic realism and travel narrative to dazzling effect. Esterhazy's hero is a professional Traveller, commissioned -- like Marco Polo by Kubla Khan -- to undertake a voyage of discovery and to prepare a travelogue about the Danube. Communicating his experiences through terse -- and at times surreal -- telegrams to his employer, the Traveller weaves a rich tapestry of narratives, evoking the dreamlike past and the precarious present of a disappearing world. Moving from the Black Forest to the Black Sea, Esterhazy takes the reader on a fascinating European journey of the imagination, down the Danube River, through Vienna, Budapest, and beyond the delta where the mighty river empties into the sea. Filled with allusion, fable, fantasy, history, and autobiography, The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (down the Danube) is Peter Esterhazy at his scintillating, adventurous best.

The Glance of Countess Hahn-Hahn (Down the Danube)

′I WILL WRITE ABOUT ALL THAT IN MORE DETAIL LATER.′ The final sentence of Helping Verbs of the Heart - was it a promise, a threat, a quote? In 1985, when Péter Esterházy′s book came out on unnumbered, black-edged pages, this much-cited sentence seemed most likely to be the manifestation of authorial posturing. After the publication of his books on his father Celestial Harmonies and Revised Edition, this sentence and the preceding book on his mother′s death, broken up into auxiliary verbs, now gain new meaning twenty-three years later in Not Art. Not Art is the book of the reawakened mother, a mother who knows the offside rule, and whose language, which determines her relationship to the world, is the language of football. The son only exists in relation to it, just as everything and everyone else only exists in relation to this mother′s football language. Football, in the author′s last book a stage and a medium for private historiography, now acts as a worldview, its roots in his relationship to his mother and his mother tongue: a mother′s language complex. Readers seeking ′family stories′ will find them - in subtly written, rounded stories. Those looking for emotions will find them too: platonic love, marital love filled with tenderness, and of course love for his mother and father. And those interested in the esterházyesque auto-reflexive textual world (where does the author begin and end) will not be disappointed either. Irony, beauty, history, the Magnificent Magyars, father, grandmother, aunt, uncle, mother, life and death, especially death, but beautifully written. And life too, of course, which comes before death. ′My mother talked her way through the entire sixties and seventies in French. Boy, even comrade sounds bearable in French. She slipped into the French language as if into a bunker. No, a bunker would be more German, concrete protection; language is a lighter form of asylum, if danger were ahead it would provide no protection, a hiding place, a hideout, a wing under which one cannot shelter. Whenever she left French she immediately moved into football. One might say my mother was on the run her whole life long. And one might also say that she was happy her whole life long.′

Peter Esterhazy

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